Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the sixth part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 6

In 1987, Katharine Meyer-Graham and her four children owned about 28 percent of Washington Post Company stock—which was worth about $660 million—as well as all of the company’s class A stock, which enabled the Meyer-Graham Dynasty to continue to elect the majority of the Washington Post Company’s board of directors. In October 1987, Fortune magazine estimated that the combined worth of Eugene Meyer’s daughter, Katharine Meyer-Graham, and his grandson, Columbia Pulitzer Prize Board Member Donald Meyer-Graham, exceeded $1.1 billion.

In the early 1990s, Eugene Meyer’s daughter still owned about 41 percent of the WashingtonPost/Newsweek media conglomerate’s class A stock and still had the exclusive right to vote over 9 percent in additional class A stock, still giving her the right to elect the majority of the media conglomerate’s corporate board. About 800,000 copies of the Washington Post newspaper were being circulated by the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s company each day during the early 1990s.

The half-brother of former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham—Bob Graham—sat in the U.S. Senate as a senator from Florida from 1987 until early in the 21st-century. Prior to entering the U.S. Senate, Bob Graham graduated from Harvard Law School in 1962, inherited several million dollars, “took on executive positions in the family’s business enterprises, including cattle holding and dairy farms in Florida and Georgia,” and increased his inherited wealth through real estate investing between 1963 and 1979, as vice-president of his family’s Sengra Development Corporation of Miami Lakes, according to Current Biography Yearbook1986.

At the same time, Graham also involved himself in Florida Democratic Party politics and sat in the Florida state legislature from 1967 until 1979, before moving into Florida’s governor’s mansion. As Florida’s Democratic Governor between 1979 and 1987, former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham’s half-brother nominated former U.S. President Jimmy Carter at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, signed more than 130 death warrants for people who were sentenced to die on Florida’s electric chair and—along with 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton—established the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, before taking a U.S. Senate seat in 1987.

Although Newsweek poses on the newsstand in Minneapolis and St. Paul as a publication which competes with the Minneapolis Star & Tribune newspaper, in the early 1990s Newsweek’s parent company also owned 28 percent of the stock of the Cowles Communications company which owned the Minneapolis Star & Tribune in the early 1990s.

One reason you didn’t hear much satirical talk about Newsweek’s historical CIA connections, its Washington Post parent company or the Meyer-Graham Dynasty on your TV screen during the early 1990s, was that the now-Columbia University-linked Washington Post/Newsweek media conglomerate was also involved in the world of television broadcasting during the early 1990s. The Post-Newsweek Stations Inc. subsidiary of the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s Washington Post Company was the 22nd-largest U.S. broadcasting company, in terms of U.S. households reached, at that time. Through its ownership of four television stations—the ABC-affiliated WPLG-TV in Miami, the NBC-affiliated WDIV-TV in Detroit, the CBS-affiliated WJXT-TV-Jacksonville and the WFSB-TV-Hartford/New Haven in the early 1990s—the Post-Newsweek Stations subsidiary of the Washington Post Company reached nearly 5 percent of all U.S. households. Around 20 percent of all Washington Post media conglomerate income came from its Post-Newsweek Stations TV broadcasting subsidiary during the early 1990s.

One reason why you didn’t find much satirical reporting about the cultural quality of the U.S. military-industrial-media complex’s “alternative” U.S. cable-tv programming in the pages of Newsweek during the early 1990s was that the Washington Post Company’s Post-Newsweek Cable subsidiary operated 53 pay-tv cable systems in the United States during the early 1990s.

Around 451,000 U.S. households subscribed to a Post-Newsweek Cable pay-tv system in the 15 Midwestern, Southern and Western states in which Newsweek affiliates did business in the early 1990s under the following names: 1. Post Newsweek Cable of Oklahoma; 2. Post Newsweek Pacific Cable; 3. Post Newsweek Cable of North Dakota; 4. Post Newsweek Cable of Indiana; 5. Post Newsweek Cable of California; 6. Omnicom Cablevision of Illinois: 7. Mark Cablevision of Green Inc.; 8. Coastal Bend Cablevision; 9. Sandoval County Cable Television; and 10. Bisbee Cable TV. The Washington Post Company also owned about 1/3 of Sports Channel’s ventures in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago during the early 1990s. And Newsweek’s parent company owned a majority interest in Scotland’s Tayside Cable Systems, Kingdom Cablevision Limited and Scotcable-Motherwell Limited in the early 1990s. (end of part 6)